Squadron 42: Space combat game by the creator of wing commander. Ambitious as hell.

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Ooh come on, people have just said the space combat in WC games is like WW1 / WW2 (Guns are by far the most important factor in killing other stuff, as opposed to modern times where it is missiles). We never said that that is not fun.

I never liked the wing commander flight model... it felt like it had no flight model.

Funny enough, I asked Roberts about this.

Wing Commander 1 and 2 did have full flight models, but Wing Commander 3 did not. Essentially the lead programmer cheated when production was nearing the end, which had the odd benefit of giving birth to the autoslide feature. It's why the combat in WC3 feels like you're always flying in a straight line as opposed to momentum we had been used to in prior games. The intended flight model was then reintroduced into Wing Commander 4.

... hosting the crowdfunding on his own site is a bit sketchy (even if it will save tens of thousands).

I think it went beyond sketchy and halfway toward failure. To have that level of exposure and not be able to convert it into pledges at maximum capacity was a long dive off suck mountain. The campaign page is presently failing to do a couple crucial things. There's still no counter (the total was somewhere north of $400k last I saw). And there's no easy comment page for the forumly disinclined, and thus no means of encouraging casual backers to stay involved. I'm pretty sure these things matter.

IISC, at launch the first two tiers of substance ($30 and $35) were limited, with the $40 tier being the standard base tier. The $35 tier is gone now, and the $30 tier doesn't seem to be limited any longer. I'm not sure what impact that's going to have on the campaign, but I imagine any savings self-hosting was going to provide is on its way toward evaporating. As much as I want this project to succeed, I'm not sure I'd be willing to spend $40 on a digital pre-order two years in advance, so good riddance.

1) A Kickstarter page is going up soon, it will be responsible for half of the $2 million fundraising goal, as many people have demanded/suggested that the project be on there because they trust the site (or won't donate/buy unless it's on Kickstarter/Steam). The Pledge amounts will be the same across both sites.

2) Multiplayer servers have a cap of 128 players.

3) Former Origin and Digital Anvil folk on the project include George Oldziey, Martin Galway, and Eric Peterson, as well as many others.

4) Donations will support the option of being increased on both sites.

So one correction, the Kickstarter is going to be $500k, not $1 million. They don't want the private fund to lose any steam, so to speak.

Also, to respond to assumptions that the single player part of the game is somehow tertiary and not a major part of the game, Roberts wrote on the RSI facebook page:

Hi, Chris Roberts here.

I've seen a few concerned posts on the Facebook stream about whether there's going to be a single player game, and whether if the budget gets tight will that be the first feature that gets cut.

I just want to be clear with everyone, Squadron 42 is an integral part of the Star Citizen experience and it will be the classic Wing Commander experience that everyone loved (without the FMV though!)

In fact the order of the development means that there's no way that Squadron 42 will be cut, as the features for this, and multi-player dogfights are the first steps in building Star Citizen. The prototype that I showed already includes most of the functionality that I need for Squadron 42. There's still a lot of polish to do on the dogfighting and assets to be created but Squadron 42 is not the difficult part of Star Citizen.

The difficult part is building the open world that Squadron 42 fits inside. I'm confident of that too as I've built this open world twice, and have done a lot upfront technical design work to avoid some of the problems that I dealt with on Freelancer

He's 60, I doubt they could stuff his gut into the old flight suit anymore. Would be nice to at least get him doing some voiceacting though. And Thomas Wilson of course. It's just not a Wing Commanderesque game unless I'm being bullied by Biff.

I'm really trying to work out how much money to give. First Responder or Make Mine A Double. The digital stuff is all tempting, along with the extra little perks...but how much of that stuff is going to be easily obtainable in game? I know I have plenty of time to decide (well, in so much as how many spaces there are for the get-in-early ones) but eh, not sure!

Split enough. I'd prefer to casually interact with all the backers in one place (Kickstarter). I'm not inclined to sit around on the forum reading through specific topics. I think it should have been Kickstarter from the start.

Presumably he didn't want Amazon/Kickstarter to siphon away hundreds of thousands of dollars. 200k for a 2 million $ project is quite a lot of cash that doesn't go towards the game. Something like 3 dev's for a whole year.

Split enough. I'd prefer to casually interact with all the backers in one place (Kickstarter). I'm not inclined to sit around on the forum reading through specific topics. I think it should have been Kickstarter from the start.

Most existing (large scale) KSes already do that. The forums have most of the communication with periodic updates to the KS feed. Because the developers don't want their entire community dependent on KS.

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

As of right now, the whole project is looking at just over 70% funded at a total of $1,401,023 raised between the RSI and Kickstarter sites. This is impressive to me not only because it's a space sim, a genre even smaller like Kickstarters have struggled to achieve funding for, but because of the 3 day website crater that probably lost a good chunk of hype change.

I think it will peeter out at maybe $3 million, but depending on how much Chris Roberts dances for cash in the hat, it could go for slightly more.

Not to pop the cork just yet, but I'm probably going to have to start looking into making an Oculus Rift space-fighter helmet with headphone and microphone, as well as a force feedback chair, and foot petals, and swanky HOTAS setup, and one of those old Afterburner arcade cabinets that had some pod motion.